Chris Lombardi puts defense and security under the spotlight, as he shares his takes on recent NATO and EU cooperation and provides insight into the company’s own long-term strategic partnerships in Europe.

Three trends are currently driving the global electricity sector: decarbonization, decentralization and differentiation. Utilities are making significant contributions to mitigate carbon emissions, while a technology revolution is …

Europe sharpens its high-tech challenge

Europe is rapidly shedding its ‘new’ economy inferiority complex as established firms and start-ups chisel away at the US’ technological lead and move ahead in certain sectors, most notably mobile telephony.

Europe sharpened its high-tech challenge last year when mergers and acquisitions among its telecoms, media and technology (TMT) companies increased more than five fold to a record-breaking 479 billion euro and its share of global TMT deals more than doubled from 16.5% in 1998 to an all-time high of 38%.

It has maintained the pace into 2000 with VodafoneAirTouch’s 190-billion euro acquisition of Mannesmann creating the world’s biggest mobile phone company and the merger of the television division of British media group Pearson and the TV and radio interests of Germany’s Bertelsmann establishing Europe’s first cross-border broadcaster able to challenge the US media giants.

But it is Europe’s strong position in mobile telephony which is providing the best opportunity to catch up with the US. Europe leads both in manufacturing (Nokia and Ericsson are the world’s first and third largest manufacturers of hand sets) and technology (95% of European mobile phones use digital technology compared with under 50% in the US, where analogue dominates). It is also ahead in so-called Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) which allows access to the web via the mobile phone.

However, Europe should not rely on mobile telephony to book its place in the ‘new’ economy. Some industry analysts are questioning whether the potential of WAP is being exaggerated, a view which is shared by Ericsson.

And while Europe slugs it out with the US, Asia is quietly making inroads into the industry: Korea, for example, accounts for 70% of the global output of mobile phones using CDMA (code division multiple access), a US standard which many consider to be technologically superior to the European GSM system.

While Europe talks about the forthcoming mobile Internet revolution, the Japanese telecoms giant NTTDoCoMo is turning it into reality, signing up more than 5 million subscribers for its i-mode service which transfers data onto a mobile gadget with a fold-out screen several times larger than a conventional handset.